Diggers: An Archival Counterhistory of Popular Music

David Novak
Music
UC Santa Barbara

In this project, I explore counterhistories of global popular music through physical collections of sound recordings in Southeast Asia. Diggers is a multi-sited ethnography of sound archives in the Global South that develops ongoing critiques of field recording in ethnomusicology, media receptions in anthropology, and the online mediation of sound archives in the digital humanities. It focuses on emergent archives in the Global South, documenting the material histories of independent labels, file-sharing blogs, and online streaming platforms. Drawing on extensive ethnographic fieldwork among archivists, collectors, and filmmakers in Indonesia, Cambodia, Thailand, the UK and the United States, I mix ethnographic and media studies methodologies to hone on the transnational subjects that dig in the “crates” of global musical history. In Summer 2026, a return fieldwork trip in August will conclude several years of collaborative and individual ethnographic research on sound archives in Indonesia developed in the final chapter of my forthcoming book. I intend to spend much of the trip in Jakarta, completing interviews and assessments of physical media materials on site with the Irama Nusantara archival collective, and will travel to Surakarta and Yogyakarta for follow-up interviews at the Lokananta archive in Surakarta.